November 2008 Archives

Want to get involved? This week you'll have plenty of opportunities to give your thanks, time and a few hard-earned samoleans.

One of the more under-covered aspects of the recent fires was the county-wide outpouring of help and supplies they produced along with all that smoke, Southern Californians coming to their displaced neighbors aid. LAist writes that the most recent in 2008's string of crises only underscores the need to keep large numbers of trained volunteers at the ready.

Today, Mayor Villaraigosa is encouraging residents to join the City of Los Angeles Crisis Response Team (CRT), a group of volunteer residents that go on scene of emergencies to provide crisis intervention and to give referrals for victims and families who have been traumatized by, a death, a serious injury, a violent crime or other traumatic incident.

But you just don't sign up and go out to fires and train crashes--it takes training and commitment. An eight week training session with classes twice a week will begin in January at a location in Westchester on the Westside. Volunteers must be 21 years old and in good physical condition.

The program is especially in need of volunteers with bilingual capability in Spanish or Korean. For those interested, they should contact Jeffrey Zimerman, Crisis Response Team Manager at 213-978-0697 or by e-mail: LACRT@lacity.org.

You can read more about the Los Angeles Crisis Response Team here, which is not be confused with the Los Angeles Community Emergency Response Team!

With MOCA apparently in deep financial trouble, what better time to than now to volunteer at Los Angeles' premiere endangered cultural venue? Got an extra three-hundred-and-twenty-or-so bucks to spare? (And during these tough times? Look at you!) For $165 membership (plus another 155 bucks) you can join the MOCA Contemporaries, who "provide financial support for the museum through a variety of fundraising programs, and cultivate future leadership for MOCA by nurturing the next generation of art collectors and community leaders."

Of course, next week is Thanksgiving, so "Get Involved" would be complete this week without opportunities to help feed the less fortunate among our neighbors. Food on Foot operates a weekly meal program every Sunday in Hollywood, and they are still looking for Thanksgiving Day volunteers. The Los Angeles Regional Food Bank is also looking for volunteers leading to the holidays.

Have a good one!

Sam Atwood, spokesperson for the South Coast Air Quality Management District discusses how wildfires affect air quality and our health. Atwood shares tips on how to protect yourself when air quality is the most unhealthy.

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Fire is a natural cleanser. That’s a strange notion for urban folk, and little consolation for our neighbors who have lost their homes. But every year we’re faced with this. The bigger we grow, the closer we get to the source of the flames.

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The fire that swept the Oakridge Mobile Home Park in Sylmar left devastation not seen since the 1961 Bel Air fire which destroyed more than 484 homes. The Oakridge inferno claimed nearly as many.

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Another devastating series of wildfires in southern California … It’s clear that our fire season is now year-round, and that we must come to grips with where and how we build our homes, and who is going to pay for the skyrocketing costs of firefighting.

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The only thing that spreads faster than a wildfire is a viral video of a wildfire. Within hours of the first night-time fires in Montecito, burnt orange images of the images were cropping up on video sharing sites. We sent an expedition into the wilds of Youtube and brought back these images of California's most recent burn.

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Did you see the guerrilla gardeners that I featured in this story? They are great! That’s the kind of volunteer work I like. Focused, fast and fun. They make a dramatic difference in short order, plus it’s good for the environment - visually and ecologically.

So I was sad and mad to learn that shortly after the group put in the garden in Hollywood, someone came along and swiped three of the larger plants. Scott saw the empty holes when he went to water the garden a week ago. He took it all in stride. “It’s just part of guerrilla gardening” he says. (In the meantime, he got a big donation of about a hundred plants. Cool.)

But I’m less forgiving. Whoever you are who dug up those plants - that is bad karma. Aren’t you going to feel guilty every time you look at that aloe in your backyard? But wait. Here’s a recipe for redemption. Just follow your guilt to the next guerrilla gardening dig and pitch in as a volunteer. That’ll burn off the bad karma, and a few calories too. And you don’t even have to fess-up.

As for me, I told Scott to count me in. I’ll be there shovel in hand at the next dig.

Val Zavala
Anchor, SoCal Connected

Preparedness Now

This film will give you a sense of what will be happening in the event of an earthquake, to prepare and mitigate for a faster recovery.

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Next week, SoCal Connected will be spending time with students from Locke Senior High. Non-profit Green Dot Public Schools took over Locke in September, 2007, making the school a flashpoint in debates about school management, success and choice.

We'd like to use your thoughts about charter schools on the next show, so take a look at the questions below and make your voice heard! (Please make sure you leave your real email when you comment; we can't use your comments on-air unless we can reach you.)

This week's Water Cooler question is a two-and-a-half-parter. First, two questions:

For the half, we have a poll question. The First Family-Elect is looking at D.C.-area schools for First Daughters Malia and Sasha Obama. The Obama's père et mère are open to charter schools but firm opponents of voucher programs. Take our poll below on the question: Should public school supporters Michelle and Barack Obama send their daughters to public school?

Did you participate in today's historical earthquake preparedness drill? If not there's still time (hopefully!) to get prepared for the next quake.

The Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) Program "educates people about disaster preparedness for hazards that may impact their area and trains them in basic disaster response skills, such as fire safety, light search and rescue, team organization, and disaster medical operations." You can find out about CERT training in the Los Angeles area by visiting the CERT-LA website. Those of you farther afield can check with www.californiavolunteers.org for information on disaster preparedness training.

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Designmatters is an initiative from Art Center College of Design exploring the social and humanitarian application of design.

One of their initiatives is The Los Angeles Earthquake: Get Ready, a look at how 21st century communication tools can be used to create a multimedia safety campaign to prepare Southern Californians for the “big one.”

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We all know earthquakes are a force of nature. But they are a force of identity, as well. Living with the threat of quakes gives us a quintessentially Californian perspective, an appreciation of the ephemeral nature of the world we live in.

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They appear at night, working in the shadows. Within a matter of hours they transform ugly patches of neglected public land into urban gardens. No permits, no licenses, no permissions. Is it illegal? Yes. But that doesn't stop this nocturnal group of succulent-loving laborers.

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Some experts are warning it could LA’s ‘Katrina.” There may be dozens, possibly hundreds of buildings in the city of Los Angeles capable of collapsing in a major earthquake and causing thousands of deaths. These buildings are part of a group called non ductile concrete structures. Built primarily before 1976, they have weak columns that can become brittle in a major quake, causing collapse. There are an estimated 2,000 of these buildings, but only a small amount - perhaps 5 to 10 percent - are possible killer buildings.

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Think a new day is dawning? To paraphrase the President Elect-slash-One, change begins with you! Here are some suggestions to help make Barack Obama's job easier by getting involved in the SoCal area.

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I am tired of hearing California described as a “bellwether” state, the state that “sets the tone” for the rest of the country and even the world.

Pleeeeze!

That may have been true when it came to Prop 13 or movie trends. But it does NOT apply to Prop 8 - the initiative that has, for the moment, banned gay marriage in California.

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It’s part of my job at SoCal Connected to be Californi-centric in all things, and that’s rarely hard to do given how much of a bellwether we are to the rest of the nation.

What surprised me doing this story was how much the Barack Obama campaign had been foreshadowed in California politics of the 1970s and ‘80s. First, by Tom Bradley’s successful run for L.A. mayor in 1973 ... a product of a new kind of coalition-building between Southside Blacks and Westside liberals. Though many later soured on him, I think we have to give Mayor Bradley credit for pioneering in the kind of multi-ethnic consensus politics that Barack Obama has excelled in.

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Video Your Vote, Part 2 continues from here.

Leading up to this week's vote, KCET, PBS and Youtube joined together in an unprecedented exercise in citizen journalism and democracy called Video Your Vote. Thousands of voters recorded their their experiences, thoughts and impressions and uploaded them to Youtube, creating a kaleidoscopic survey of what has turned out to be an historic election. SoCal Connected and KCET New Media staff, as well as KCET Local bloggers Ophelia Chong, Jeremy Rosenberg and Kevin Ferguson, all got into the act as well, documenting their own election days and those of their neighbors.

Take a look at the images and listen to the stories below. It's also not too late to share you own story, either in the comments below or at Video Your Vote.

Individual voters tell share their stories.

It seems there was more to election day than voting..

Southern California was spared major election irregularities, but some voters did have concerns.

What you wanted and hoped for starting November 5th.

To the victors go the funny hats and shouting.

Daniel Hernandez is a writer based in Mexico City, where he is working on a non-fiction book about youth in the capital for Scribner. He started his professional career as a reporter in 2002 at the L.A. Times, where he worked as a staff writer for four years. In 2006, he switched to the LA Weekly, where he wrote long-form features on art, politics, and culture, and covered the immigrant rights movement. This post originally appeared on his blog, Intersections.

One of the most remarkable stories I read in the Los Angeles Times this year was a look at a small community of immigrants from Mexico's Costa Chica centered in Pasadena. The story, published in April, gave us a fascinating dose of nuance for a region long accustomed to overwrought tales of 'brown vs. black' violence and tension. Veteran metro reporter and editor John L. Mitchell wrote the piece. Last week he was named among 75 editorial staffers at the LAT who were bought out or fired.

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Commentator Marcos Villatoro can't help but believe there’s a smoother path ahead, both from the nearby street ridded of potholes, and from the election of Barack Obama to President.

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Remember back to 2004? Way back when there was no YouTube? No Huffington Post? Network TV was still the go-to source for candidate and issue information. Sure the candidates had cobbled together their own sites, but who could have predicted the impact of the internet just four years later?

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As the polling booths are packed away and campaign signs come down, one of California's sharpest political analysts, Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, offers her closing interpretations of this historic election year.

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Writer and KCET Local blogger Erin Aubry Kaplan wonders what the election of Barack Obama means for black Los Angeles. Kaplan has written about African-American political, economic and cultural issues since 1992. She is currently a contributing editor to the op-ed section of the Los Angeles Times, and from 2005 to 2007 was a weekly op-ed columnist - the first black weekly op-ed columnist in the paper’s history.

The first chapter of a new era is all over. On Tuesday, Barack Obama pulled off the presumably impossible with almost embarrassing ease, defeating John McCain to become the first African American president-elect in our country's history. I was at a viewing party in Culver City with a living room full of people who watched the clock and cheered like fans cheer for their team during game 7 of the NBA finals. Of course, this was far more emotional than any sporting event I've ever seen, the happiness at the outcome much more far-reaching. After Obama's acceptance speech, we poured champagne and toasted something I'd never toasted in my adult life, and I'm Obama's age. There are many things I assumed wouldn't happen in my lifetime, and this one was so remote, it wasn't even on the list. I barely knew how to feel.

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Nowhere was the elation over Barack Obama’s victory greater than in the black communities of south Los Angeles. Not only was an African American elected President, but the whole campaign was re-energizing the political hopes of African American politicians. They remember how Obama’s election was foreshadowed 35 years ago right here, when Tom Bradley became the first African American mayor of a major American city.

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Leading up to this week's vote, KCET, PBS and Youtube joined together in an unprecedented exercise in citizen journalism and democracy called Video Your Vote. Thousands of voters recorded their their experiences, thoughts and impressions and uploaded them to Youtube, creating a kaleidoscopic survey of what has turned out to be an historic election. SoCal Connected and KCET New Media staff, as well as KCET Local bloggers Ophelia Chong, Jeremy Rosenberg and Kevin Ferguson, all got into the act as well, documenting their own election days and those of their neighbors.

Take a look at the images and listen to the stories below. It's also not too late to share you own story, either in the comments below or at Video Your Vote.

A look at polling places and poll workers.

Leading up to the vote, Southern Californians shared their thoughts on Proposition 8.

Individual voters tell share their stories.

What does the outcome of the election mean to you? What do you think it means for the future of southern California? We want to hear everything, from your hopes and fears for President-Elect Obama, to what the outcomes of specific propositions mean to you.

Share your thoughts here by commenting, or upload video of yourself to our Video Your Vote project.